“The best airplane of the whole bunch to jump out of was a Ford Trimotor,” Holter recalled. “They were just easy to get out of and they were slow. They had three engines. The pilots were very good.”

Facing the front of the airplane before jumping out worked best.

“If you get sideways, you get whipped,” Holter explained. And, he says, jumping out of an airplane is no picnic.

“If you imagine yourself jumping out of a car at 70 miles per hour, that’s what you’re doing,” Holter said.

Inside the plane could be rocky before the jump. Some smokejumpers looked a bit green at times on bumpy flights, but not Holter.

“I’ve never been airsick,” he said with a smile.

Jumpers wore padded pants and leather helmets, which were like helmets that pro football players used through the 1950s. Some of these leather helmets were purchased surplus from the University of Montana, so it’s possible some smokejumpers wore helmets used by the football team.

The work could be treacherous, and oftentimes the jump was too short to open a reserve chute.

“I had a couple of malfunctions of chutes,” he said. Luckily, he landed safely each time.

“The lowest I ever jumped was 600 feet,” Holter reported. At that height, “it doesn’t take a lot of time to get down.”

Dodging large trees, smokejumpers often hit the ground with a thud. But there was a better way.

“A small tree is a good landing,” Holter observed.

Soon it was time for Holter to return to law school from his summer job.

But fires were still burning. Fire officials contacted the dean of the University of Montana School of Law, C.W. Leaphart, to see whether Holter could fight one more fire.

“You’ve got to make up your mind whether you want to be a law student,” Leaphart told Holter grumpily. “Now go put the fire out!”

As Holter explained, “He was an elk hunter. He didn’t want the forest to burn.”

In early October, Holter headed to high ground to help fight one last fire in his one-season smokejumping career. It didn’t take long. Snow fell and smothered the fire.

Holter, who grew up on a ranch in Williston, N.D., came to Great Falls in 1988 as a magistrate judge in the federal court system, a position he calls “one of the best judges’ jobs in the world.” He is semi-retired.

Richard Ecke can be reached at recke@greatfallstribune.com, or follow him @GFTrib_REcke on Twitter.